Ten Beginner Mistakes In Total War: Warhammer 3

🎯 The core idea

Ten habits, five in battle and five on the campaign map. What links them is that each one ignores a conditional — a bonus that only applies while you stand still, a shield that only blocks from the front, a spell you cannot cast because of where your army is parked.

The original video counts them 1 to 10 on screen but restarts its spoken numbering twice, which makes it genuinely hard to follow. This guide keeps the on-screen numbers and groups them properly: odd numbers are the battle mistakes, even numbers are the campaign ones.

• free costs nothing, just a habit
• cheap small gold or one skill point
• setup needs planning before it helps
• grind pays off over many turns
• skip the thing to stop doing

Mistake 1 — moving a unit that should be braced

Anti-large units carry Charge Reflection and Charge Defence. Both are gated on standing still. "Bracing" is not a button in this game — it is the state of not moving, and the moment you drag that spear block sideways the attributes stop applying.

1. Stop the unit before contact, not during it freeA stationary spear block gets its charge defence. A moving one takes the charge raw. 1:13
2. If cavalry is already committed, halt immediately freeAgainst light cavalry a moving unit may survive anyway. Against a big monster the situation is, in his words, quite different. 1:59

Mistake 3 — firing artillery into your own melee

Warhammer 3 fixed a lot of this. Many missile units now hold fire when a friendly unit blocks the line to the target, which was not true in Warhammer 2 — a cannon ordered to shoot through your own line would simply shoot through your own line.

What did not get fixed is artillery and magic. Artillery keeps executing the old fire order after the target has walked into melee with your own troops.

1. Stop firing the moment your target is engaged freeIt will not stop on its own. Watch the frame above — the shot arcs are converging on a unit that is already in melee. 6:44
2. Re-target something far from your own line freeNot the next unit over. Something with space around it. 7:08
3. Cancel artillery before charging the same target with cavalry freeThis is the version that kills your own units most often, because you are creating the melee yourself. 7:32

Mistake 5 — shooting at shields

Shields are not primarily a melee stat. They are missile resistance, and specifically resistance to missiles arriving from the front.

He fumbles the exact number on camera — "up to 55, no, up to 65, maybe, percent" — and then restates it as "half your arrows get wasted." Take the shape of the claim rather than the figure: a large fraction of everything your archers, handgunners and crossbowmen send at a shielded front is simply gone.

1. Check for a shield before assigning missile infantry freeThen send them at something unshielded, which goes down far faster for the same ammunition. 12:20
2. Ignore shields entirely when you are firing artillery freeHis phrasing: for large projectiles "the shields are like if they don't exist." 11:58

Mistake 7 — charging cavalry into the front

Two things go wrong at once here. The charge bonus is a window, not a state — roughly ten to fifteen seconds — and after it closes your cavalry is generally worse in a stand-up fight than the infantry it is standing in. And a frontal target is exactly the one that brings charge reflection and charge defence to bear, which is mistake 1 seen from the other side.

1. Pin them with something else first setupHammer and anvil. The infantry holds them, the cavalry arrives somewhere that is not the front. 16:20
2. Charge flanks, sides or rear — never the front freeFronts brace better and negate part of your charge bonus outright. Flanks and rear do not. 17:31
3. Pull out after about fifteen seconds and charge again freeCycling. Leaving them in melee after the window closes is throwing away the only thing they were there for. 15:32
4. Send them at artillery and missile infantry setupThe targets that cannot answer a charge at all. 16:20

Mistake 9 — deploying with no lanes

That is the anti-pattern in one picture: a single continuous infantry line with nowhere to walk through it.

His term for the fix is "hallways", which is not a game term — he means gaps between unit blocks. The problem they solve is characters. A spellcaster who needs to reach a casting position, or a support hero stranded on the wrong flank, gets heavily slowed by your own troops, and the automatic formation defaults to exactly the compact block that causes it.

1. Plan the gaps during deployment setupBefore the battle starts, not when you need one. 21:56
2. Slide two units aside to open a lane mid-battle freeThe emergency version, for when the caster has to get forward now. 22:18

Mistake 2 — growth before money

Both buildings sit in the infrastructure tab, last on the right, and the instinct is to take growth because growth leads to settlement upgrades and upgrades lead to everything else.

The trap is that each successive population surplus point costs more growth and more turns than the last. If you cannot afford the upgrade on the turn the point arrives, the growth that produced it was wasted.

1. Money building first cheapHis flat rule: "the first building that you should buy, it's money." 4:23
2. Upgrade on the exact turn the surplus point lands freeHolding an unspent point is holding a depreciating asset. 3:59
3. Fund armies before going back to buildings grindHe borrows the line about all the gold in the world being useless without a sword. 4:47

Mistake 4 — ignoring the Winds of Magic

This is the one he admits missing for his first two years of playing, and the one he says almost nobody knows.

The Winds of Magic your army has depends heavily on the territory it is standing in. Hover a region and the tooltip tells you directly: weak, blowing, tempestuous. An army sitting in a weak-winds region sits at zero points and stays there — and at zero you cannot cast at all.

1. Read the Winds of Magic line before you park freeIt is in the region tooltip on the campaign map, next to the ambush chance. 8:47
2. Never leave a magic-focused army in a weak region skipHis demo army holds two casters and, in his words, "this army is useless — a couple of wizards that can do nothing." 9:58
3. A melee army can stand wherever it likes freeThe constraint only binds armies that were going to cast something. 10:21

Here the same tooltip reads Tempestuous +10 — the numeric value he never states out loud. Tempestuous regions also show winds increasing turn over turn, even for an army with no spellcaster in it at all.

Mistake 6 — parking a big army to recruit one unit

A dragon, a large monster or a top-tier war machine can take up to six turns to recruit. Sitting your main stack in the settlement for all six means paying full upkeep for six turns of doing nothing.

1. Hire a second lord with almost no units cheapMore lords means more pay, but a lord with two units costs very little — and he is the one who waits. 14:43
2. Keep the expensive army moving freeIts upkeep is justified by what it is doing, not by where it is standing. 13:32
3. Or match the recruit time to replenishment you needed anyway setupIf the stack needs one turn to top up, take a one-turn recruit at the same time. Then the stall is free. 13:57

Mistake 8 — always occupying, never sacking

He calls always-occupying not merely suboptimal but "probably the worst" strategy, and the argument is about what a weakened enemy is worth to you alive.

Sack instead. The settlement stays in enemy hands, the enemy stays alive and weak, and you come back and do it again — each time for money and for unit experience. Meanwhile your own empire stays compact enough to defend.

1. Take Sack over Occupy by default freeEspecially on hard difficulty, where a wider empire is a longer border you cannot garrison. 18:45
2. Farm the same weakened neighbour repeatedly grindMoney and rank both, from an enemy who can no longer threaten you. 19:08
3. Occupy only with the money and the armies to hold it setupOr when the settlement is strategically important. Razing he considers rarely necessary. 20:00

He names three options aloud — occupy, raze, sack — but the panel on screen shows four. Loot & Occupy is never discussed anywhere in the video.

Mistake 10 — leaving heroes unused

Heroes do two jobs and most players only ever use one. Fill the army slots first — a melee lord wants a spellcaster alongside him — but two or three per army is the ceiling. Everything past that belongs on the campaign map.

1. Cap heroes in an army at two or three cheapBeyond that they are worth more as agents than as extra bodies. 24:14
2. Damage the walls before a siege setupA spellcaster agent action. Makes the assault materially smoother, and it is the one he singles out. 24:38
3. Wound a dangerous enemy hero before he reaches your army cheapUse a melee specialist or an assassin type for this, not a spellcaster — they are bad at it and it can fail. 25:02
4. Send a hero to a region with low control freeFaster and cheaper than parking an army there or waiting to build a control building. 25:25

What the comments add that the video skipped

Three mistakes commenters raised that are arguably bigger than several on the list:

• Judging units by tier number instead of by traits. A tier one or two spearman unit can beat a tier three to five monster, and some low-tier missile units kill flying monsters. Related: only ever casting offensive spells, when buffs and debuffs are frequently more cost-effective. — Wojciech_Leszczyński
• Not rushing campaign movement range and replenishment. Movement range is described as the best campaign stat in the game, worth rush-building any hero that grants it. — emultra759
• Skipping the blue-line Lightning Strike talent. It gives you the full Winds of Magic pool in every split battle rather than once, and wiping a Greenskin host army despawns its Waaagh army. — emultra759

And one on presentation rather than mechanics, which several people raised independently: labelling both mistake 1 and mistake 2 as "the first mistake" makes the video hard to follow. That is why this guide regroups them.

Sources

Built from Total War Therapy, 10 Terrible NOOB MISTAKES I Wish I Knew Before..., 26 minutes, and the top comments underneath it. Screenshots are frames from that video.

The shield percentage is stated three different ways in a single sentence in the original and should not be quoted as a precise figure. The faction being played is never named on camera; several claims — the six-turn dragon recruit especially — are asserted rather than demonstrated, since the campaign shown has short recruit times.